I'm not really sure where this would go, so i'll just put it here.
I was wondering if any of you seasoned filmmakers out there can tell me if it's hard to make a short. I've heard of people churning out tons of shorts, but im just not seeing how it's so easy. From what i've been told a short is usually 1-4 minutes long, is it hard to fit plot in that short of a time?

I'm sorry if this is an ignorant question, i'd just like to get this cleared up in me head. Thanx

Welcome to the forum. 1-4 minutes is definitely a short .. but so is 40 minutes. Just write your ideas and see how long they end up being. If you get caught up with time constraints and page length, you may be sacraficing your story. Good luck!

Thanx, that helped alot :)

1-4 minute shorts is a good starting point for some, but others aren't able to fit an entire idea into that time. My first short was 10 minutes +. I don't think I've done one shorter.

Poke

My shorts always seem to end up being 10 minutes long. 1-4 minute shorts are what you will always see on TV, but you can make a movie however long you want. If you want to market a short, 1-4 minutes is better: it can go before a movie in a theater (they do this a lot in places outside the U.S.) or it can fit into a TV show (shorts will never make much money, but hey, it's exposure). I would suggest simply doing whatever feels right to you, I think that's what most filmmakers do when they make shorts.

We see thirty and sixty second shorts all the time on television in the form of commercials. Many of those tell a story of sorts. It's just a really short one.

I read an article in the New York Times a few days ago about the upcoming "advertainment" that we will likely be seeing soon. It changes the way those 30/60 second commercials will run... and will be interesting to see how it turns out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/business/media/21adco.html

Thanks for posting that link. This move toward more "advertainment", in its various forms, really is an interesting trend in advertising.